Hello everyone. Hope you had a fantastic Halloween yesterday. Hope the trick-or-treaters and the spooky, scary skeletons treated you very well, and you got to stay in bed after watching your first-ever frightening movie. Hopefully, you nightlighted your entire room.
But just because Halloween is over, it doesn’t mean I’m done delivering the scares.
In professional wrestling, some wrestlers have been known to spookify the audience. You have guys like the Undertaker, Kane, The Boogeyman, Bray Wyatt as “The Fiend”, etc.
But there is one terrifying wrestler, but in a different way. This man pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable in wrestling. If you were in the ring with him, you feared for your life. It didn’t matter if you were a rookie or a veteran; he was going to make sure you had nightmares for the rest of your life. And that man was none other than Jerome Young, aka New Jack.
Now you may be asking yourself, “This random black guy with a durag is scarier than the Undertaker?”
Yes, and I have two key pieces of evidence.
Evidence #1: The Mass Transit Incident
This is the defining moment that made New Jack a legend for all the wrong reasons. In 1997, ECW was running a small show in Revere, Massachusetts, and one of the wrestlers, Axl Rotten, couldn’t make the show. Thus, a local kid named Eddie Kulas volunteered to take his place. There were two problems, though: He claimed he was 21 (when he was really 17) and said that he had been trained by Killer Kowalski (which he wasn’t). He was even dressed in full wrestling attire and gave himself the in-ring name “Mass Transit.”
Thinking he was legit, ECW manager Paul Heyman partnered him with D-Von Dudley to face off against New Jack and Mustafa, The Gangstas.
Before the match, Kulas asked New Jack backstage to “get him some color” (in wrestling terms, to make someone bleed, usually through blading). New Jack happily obliged, but Kulas didn’t know what that meant.
So what did New Jack do? He used a SURGICAL SCAPEL to cut Kulas open, even deeper than usual. Kulas started to bleed heavily and even asked for his dad. The incident made mainstream news. New Jack and ECW were even taken to court but were acquitted.
Evidence #2. The Vic Grimes Incident
This is the cherry on top of all the downright despicable things New Jack has ever done.
At ECW Living Dangerously 2000, New Jack and Vic Grimes were supposed to do a big spot, where both would fall off a scaffold 20 feet high and through some tables. However, Grimes got cold feet and ended up jumping the wrong way, landing directly on New Jack’s head with all his 300-pound body weight. New Jack suffered a fractured skull, brain damage, temporary blindness in one eye, and chronic migraines.
Grimes thought nothing of the aftermath, but New Jack wanted revenge. And two years later, he would get it. Before facing Grimes in a scaffold match (sure, why not) at XPW Freefall 2002, New Jack went in with murder on his mind, telling people before the bout and even in interviews that he was going to kill Grimes. During the match, both were atop the 40-foot scaffold. Grimes was too afraid to fall off, so New Jack decided to do it for him, using a REAL TASER to stun him. New Jack then threw Grimes off the scaffold, hoping he would hit the turnbuckle and die, but luckily, Grimes would hit some tables, sustaining multiple injuries, but living to see another day.
So the moral of the story for any aspiring wrestler: don’t be a New Jack.
Delivered by Sean Paul
